


Mount and make ready

by HotUtilitarian



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Ancient Agender Beings, Bad Coffee, Bullshit Heraldry, Extreme Handwavium, Homophobic Language, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Legal Codswallop, M/M, Marriage of Convenience, Nice Biscuits, Other, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Scotland
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-04-06
Packaged: 2018-10-13 06:22:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10508076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HotUtilitarian/pseuds/HotUtilitarian
Summary: The Right Honourable the Lord Lyon King of Arms, head of Lyon Office, the world's oldest heraldic court, has a proposition for Steve Rogers. Notthatsort of proposition. Though, come to think...





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [disenchanted](https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/gifts).



> I wrote this for a bet (sort of: I'm not sure what the terms actually were now. Honour was invoked in some way.) I'm sure there are shedloads of mistakes even where I haven't taken liberties: my apologies. 
> 
> Thanks to [Naraht](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht) and [havisham](http://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/pseuds/havisham) for Ameripicking and other beta duties. All remaining errors are my own.

The parking lot was about the size of the living-room in Steve’s old walk-up, oppressively boxed in by cinderblock walls, its limited space further reduced by a brimming dumpster. Once he’d gotten the rented Mondeo politely tucked into one corner, under a sign that detailed in faded but still somehow angry red lettering the penalties to be visited on UNAUTHORISED USERS, he reckoned there was probably room for one other car, as long as it was a small one. Well, this mission had never promised glamor. That was why he’d accepted it.

The hotel was kind of cute, though. If you stuck a porch onto the front and clapboard over the sandstone, it might pass for a mid-sized B & B in Vermont, though it loomed over all the other buildings in the square, except the one in the middle, lurking jailhouse-squat behind its whimsical tower, which was where he had to go tomorrow morning. The name on the frontage reminded him of his fifth-grade teacher, tiny and plump and fierce, marching them up and down between the rows of desks as she sang in her strong, shrill voice. The last time he’d thought of Miss Johnston had been after one of those silences so long and comfortable that you forgot the other person hadn’t shared everything you'd been thinking, and he’d asked Peggy, ‘why _deal_?’ 

It took some explaining, but at last she’d said, ‘Not _deal_ , silly. _Deil._ As in—the devil, why the devil won’t you march forward in order?’ 

'Huh. Wonder if Miss Johnston knew it. She used paddle pretty good for milder cussing than that. Even though she was shorter than just about every kid in the class.' 

'Except one?' 

'Yeah.' 

He flinched from the memory of Peggy's composed face brightening into mischief. He knew he had to stop flinching, confront the pain until it dwindled into bittersweet regret. He shouldered his grip and entered the lobby. 

The only sign of life was the distant whine of a vacuum cleaner. He rang the bell on the reception desk a couple of futile times before following the cord down a dim corridor that was only about six inches wider and three taller than he was, and which ended in a double door with pink frosted-glass panels. The floor was uneven and the carpet the mind-bendingly ugly kind with geometric flower patterns that he remembered from his last trip to Engl—Great Britain, he mentally corrected. An island comprising most of the territory of England, Scotland and Wales. The briefing had been insistent on that point. 

At the end of the cord he found the expected piece of equipment, turned on and throbbing, with its pipe thrown carelessly across the floor, but no human operator. He bent to flick the switch and prop the safety hazard against the wall, which brought a shadow to the double door. It opened, giving a brief impression of improbable expanse and disuse. 

A man emerged; short and lean, he looked more like a preliminary sketch for a person than the finished product. 'Yes?' he said, frowning as if the presence of a stranger carrying luggage in the public areas of a hotel were both a mystery and an affront. 'Can I help you?' 

Steve grinned. Seventy years had clearly neither diminished British pride in surly customer service nor brought the hostility to a level that could faze a New Yorker. 'Hi,' he said. 'I want to check in, but there's no-one in reception.' 

'Where's Brian wandered off to, then?' the man said, mostly to himself. 'He's a very naughty boy. This way.' 

Steve followed him back down the corridor to the lobby. 

'There you go, Mr Rogers. I've put you in the Armstrong, our honeymoon suite. It has a king-sized four-poster.' He surveyed Steve as if he were a large and inefficient household item bestowed on him by a notorious repurposer of gifts. 

'Quiet season, huh?' 

'Now, rather, I suppose. But you should see it at the Common Riding. Follow me.' 

Steve was glad of Wikipedia. He picked up his bag. 'That's when you check the bounds of the town, right?' 

The man gave him a narrow, loose-lips-sink-ships look. 'Beat the bounds, yes. It's the best time of the year. For the trade. Or so I'm told. We've only run the place since September.’ 

By the time they reached the room, Steve was no longer sure where he was in the building that from the outside looked so compact. He couldn't even be certain whether he was on the second or third floor. With an air of glum defiance, the manager flung open the door and began to enumerate easily-overlooked points of interest, like the window and the closet. 

Steve put down his grip and looked around, unsettled by a feeling that he finally identified as nostalgia. The decor recreated, with uncanny accuracy, the mood of Britain, of England, whatever, in 1944. Not that it looked like a hotel room of that date, or even like one of the overdone, off-key imitations that magazines and blogs called 'vintage'. In fact, everything was new and blandly modern. But also exhausted and makeshift under a layer of breezy cynicism, the shabbiness evident before the veneer had started to wear away. To Steve's eye, the bed looked only regular-sized, but it had a tall canopy frame, around which, instead of drapes, someone had twisted a gauzy fabric that in color and texture reminded him of nylon stockings, but not in a good way. He thought it was the saddest piece of furniture he had ever seen. 

The manager was fussing with the TV remote. Beyond his muttered imprecations Steve heard a scuffle, and stepped forward, instinctively placing himself between a civilian and the danger to which his presence might have exposed him. 

A young man stood in the doorway that must lead to the bathroom, juggling a white cube in one hand. He was dark-haired, lithe and rangy, with a high forehead and firm jaw tapering sharply to a deeply cleft chin. His gaze, an unexpected pale gray, slid coolly over Steve and alighted, meltingly, on his companion, who finally looked up from the uncooperative device and said, peevishly, ‘Brian. You left reception unattended.’ 

‘Sorry.’ Under Brian’s big, flirtatious smile the dour little man seemed to fill out, becoming almost three-dimensional. Steve swallowed. He hated to look uncomfortable, because he wasn’t uncomfortable. Not for the reason people assumed, anyway. ‘The shaver unit in there needs replacing,’ Brian said, waggling the cube. ‘I’ll have to drive into Carlisle to get the part.’ 

‘It’s OK,’ Steve said, feeling foolish. A few blogs he'd read had noted this eccentricity of a specialized socket in hotel bathrooms. ‘I don’t use a shaver.’ 

‘Here, Allan, give us that.’ Brian took the remote and firmly pressed two buttons in sequence. The wall-mounted TV sprang into crude, blobby, pastel-colored animation and plinky melody, drowning the rest of Allan’s welcome spiel. 

‘ _And this is Daddy Pig!_ ’ it shrilled. Daddy Pig grunted brutishly and the other blobs giggled. 

‘—is from seven thirty to nine on weekdays. Anything else we can do for you, Mr Rogers?’ 

‘No, well, I’m pretty hungry. Could I get a—’ 

Allan retreated into human blueprint mode. ‘Kitchen’s closed, I’m afraid.’ he said repressively. ‘And we don’t serve lunch on a Wednesday. Half-day, see?’ 

‘ _Apple, orange, BAN NAH NAH, Pear and pineapple too_ —’ shrieked the TV. 

Goddammit, nothing about this country had changed. Steve opened and closed his hand in the same gesture of mingled hilarity and frustration as he had over seventy years ago, trying not to remember that the people to whom he’d expostulated about the crazy Brits, always shutting shop at the exact moment when there was likely to be footfall, were all— Except one. And he wasn’t going to let that into his thoughts, not now. 

‘ _Eat fivepiecesoffruitaday because they’re GOOD FOR YOU!_ ’ the TV bawled. 

‘Right then, Mr Rogers. Have a nice stay.’ 

As Brian loped past him he winked and murmured, ‘Come down to the bar. You can give me your verdict on my artisanal wasabi pork scratchings.’ 

Taking a shower in the gray, silver and mauve bathroom, Steve decided he must have conjured that out of an overheated imagination. 

That evening Steve ate in lonely splendor in the dining room, which was the big, neglected-looking space from which Allan had first emerged. The carpet was striped orange, crimson, navy and green on a beige background, colors very approximately echoed in the geometric squares of the wallpaper that covered three walls; the fourth was mysteriously shrouded in a flimsy scarlet curtain. Music which, from the sheer volume of synths, must date from the 1980s, though Steve didn’t recognize most of the songs (Sam’s playlists hadn’t really clued him in on the whiter end of pop) sounded tinnily from behind it. It was like that show he’d sort of liked at the start, but had given up in exasperation when it seemed to be just inventing the plot from episode to episode— _Twin Peaks_. Except the curtain didn’t pull back to reveal a giant and a dwarf, the synths just kept on dinning away. _Take on me, take me on, I’ll become—_ That was Miss Johnson’s sixth-grade successor, Miss Herman, diagramming sentences, _in English word order is not free_ , she would announce, teutonically, at least six times per class. The food—well, that had changed. He remembered snoek, beef hearts and the eternal Jerusalem artichoke. Now it was _deconstructed_ , _coulis_ and _jus_ and the fries were thicker than his middle finger and served in a miniature wire supermarket cart. He knew Brian was the chef, somehow, and pulled himself up before he started feeling indulgent about the constituent parts of a mango cheesecake served in four separate dishes. 

When he passed the bar on his way back to the room it was empty apart from Allan and a woman with an ash-blonde ponytail, laughing and pointing at a phone. He heard Allan say, ‘Retro florals, Jackie, what the fuck? It looks like Julie Andrews exploded in an ox farm shop!’ Or something like that. 

It took him a long time to get to sleep in the depressing-nylons bed, though the mattress was new and springy. He dreamed of his mother: they were sitting opposite one another, cross-legged, and their knees aligned even though he was in his present and proper body and she didn’t seem any taller than the four feet eleven inches she’d been in life. She reached out and grasped both his elbows and said _now, look at you, a big high heidyin in a big high job_ and rocked back and forth, wheezing with delight. Behind her, dismembered bronze limbs, powered by their own verdigris, leapt like dolphins in a lake of mercury. 

There was nobody in the lobby in the morning. A clingy smell of frying meat drifted up from the passage to the dining room. Steve wasn’t hungry, he rarely ate breakfast. He wanted coffee; he wasn’t sure what _for_ exactly, but that one hung on, unlike the desire for alcohol. He dismissed the craving with the thought of what the Liddlesdale Hotel’s coffee probably tasted like, and left his keycard behind the desk. 

He dumped his grip in the trunk of the Mondeo and crossed the road to the Town Hall. He obeyed the sign to enter round the back, noticing above the institutional-looking blue door a small, chipped plaque that read ‘Hugh MacDiarmid: International Poet: 1892-1978.’ He wondered if that was something he should know about, but didn’t take out his notebook. 

In the hallway there was a wire rack of miscellaneous civic leaflets and a janitor mopping the green, marbled linoleum, who pointed him wordlessly upstairs. He hesitated at the top of them, suddenly unsure if he had actually said the mandated code phrase— _I have an appointment with the librarian about genealogical research_ (he was to mispronounce ‘genealogical’ in a pre-approved way)—aloud or not. Too late now, anyway. He knocked on the door marked ‘Reading Room’. 

‘Come!’ whistled a thin, hoarse Scottish voice. 

The library was windowless, low-ceilinged and cramped. Steel bookshelves lined the walls, stacked with files, document boxes and large bound volumes of newspapers. A microfilm reader crouched in a corner. One wall might sweep aside to reveal a teeming bunker: that was always possible. But unlikely. Steve felt at home: he grinned and greeted the librarians occupying orange plastic chairs at one of the two formica-topped tables, comfortable people wearing patterned woolens and gray slacks. 

‘Good morning, Captain Rogers,’ said the fatter and shorter of the two, rising to shake his hand. ‘I’m Lord Lyon, King of Arms, and this is Unicorn Pursuivant of Arms. You would be mistaken, however, to draw any conclusion thereto about our feeling on the referendum question.’ 

‘Uh-huh. Hi.’ Steve shook hands with Unicorn Pursuivant, tall, long-faced and gray, who grimaced minutely. 

‘Just Lord Lyon’s little joke, Captain. Do sit down. Did you have a good journey?’ 

‘Yeah. Fine. No hitches.’ 

‘The Liddlesdale used to be quite famous along the Borders. I hope you found it satisfactory.’ 

‘Uh. OK. Homey.’ Which was true, if your home had involved effortful, insufficient food, spindly, tacky fixtures, brittle laughter and untold melancholy. 

‘Good. Well, we’ve brought you a long way,’ Lord Lyon said, ‘I hope not fruitlessly, so we’ll get straight down to business. I take you’ve read the briefing and know something of the approximate function of the Lyon Court and its remit.’ 

‘Yeah. I was kind of surprised. I mean. Heraldry. You don’t expect—’ 

‘We’re a revenue-collecting government department, Captain, as well as, in the delightful phrase of my predecessor the 30th Lord Lyon, “the custodians of the pageantry and romance of Scotland's mediaeval grandeur.” And I, though of all of them the most humble, am a Minister of the Crown. The apparently obsolete may be a powerful weapon in modern struggles.’ 

‘Uh-huh.’ 

‘Now. Do you know what is meant by the term “armigerous clan”?’ 

‘I guess. I mean, I looked it up.’ 

‘Go on,’ Unicorn Pursuivant said, maliciously encouraging, in the way of people who enjoy being on job interview panels. 

‘Uh, well, in general, a Scottish clan with a chief entitled to bear undifferenced arms, but in modern usage, a clan with no recognized chief. And because the chief alone confers status on the clan, an armigerous clan has no legal standing under Scots law.’ 

Lord Lyon gave Unicorn Pursuivant a minutely satisfied look, like someone collecting on a bet whose small monetary hazard stands in inverse proportion to the honor at stake. 

‘Weel,’ said Unicorn Pursuivant tightly, ‘you could find that out from Wikipedia.’ 

‘I did,’ Steve said, shrugging. ‘It’s amazing.’ 

‘And so you will also know that the Clan Buchanan has been armigerous, in that sense, since 1682. The last recognized Chief, the fifteenth—’ 

‘Twenty-second—’ interjected Lord Lyon. 

‘Historians differ,’ Unicorn Pursuivant explained, with a patient, dusty sigh, ‘on the status of the early Chiefs, who are poorly represented in the historical record. The last recognized Chief, John Buchanan of that ilk, left no issue male, and, it was thought, no arrangement whereby his estate could pass to the descendants of his daughters.’ 

‘It was thought. So you mean there was one?’ 

‘Such an arrangement has recently come to light, yes.’ 

‘Buried in an secret archive, huh?’ 

Steve saw immediately that he’d said something wrong. Even Lord Lyon’s round pink countenance hollowed slightly, losing some of its cheerful glow. 

‘Archivists do not _bury_ documents, Captain Rogers.’ Unicorn Pursuivant’s reedy voice could have been used for battery electrolyte. ‘It is not the, ah, _virtue_ of an archive to keep things _secret_. No, the deed in question resided in private hands for over three hundred years, but lately came up for sale at auction, with some letters of interest to scholars of Sir Walter Scott. The vendor was bankrupt, so I suppose it scarcely mattered to him that it undermined his ancestors’ claim to an admittedly depleted estate, founded upon a bond of Tailzie drawn up between between John Buchanan and his particular friend and comrade in arms George Buchanan, or perhaps he did not know. In any case, it opened the possibility that the chiefly line is not extinct.’ 

Steve mentally pictured the feeling he had now, this _ache_ , its poignancy never dulled by familiarity, as a lodestone suspended from his sternum, dark, hard, insistently tugging. He thought of something he’d read a long time ago, high school maybe, he couldn’t quite remember where: _When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them._ That was kind of primitive, though, magical thinking. He needed to get over it. 

‘Bucky,’ he said, with effort. ‘Of all the things he—well, a Highland Chief wasn’t high up on the list.' 

Lord Lyon took up the thread. 'There are certain irregularities. Lyon Court no longer maintains a crass prejudice against descent through the female line—one of the welcome reforms instituted by my great predecessor, the 30th. But the clan Chief should normally bear the clan name, as a principal, that is, a last name. Hyphenations are less then ideal. That would seem to be an obstacle, except the birth certificate of the claimant under discussion very conveniently names him simply as James Buchanan.' 

Steve thought back to a noisy, flickering chaotic kitchen, with rag-rugs on the scrubbed floor and rug-rats crawling up the walls; stooped, mousy-haired Mr Barnes the still, long-suffering center of it all. It seemed like an intolerable intrusion into the poor old guy's privacy, even if he had been dead for—Steve realized he had no idea when Bucky's parents had passed, still thinking that their eldest son had given his life for his country. 

'The usual thing, I suppose,' Lord Lyon said cozily. 'An informal adoption. There was a war on, after all. But his mother's descent from John Buchanan is indubitable and direct, patrilineal for as long as that matters. And he is her first son. There's also the matter of, ah, seniority. No known rival candidate has a birthdate in 1917.' 

Steve thought all this was moving too fast. 'But—but, wait. I don’t see how I fit in. And is this what you folks do all day? Find former HYDRA assassins to give coats of arms to?’ In his bewilderment he spoke more angrily than he’d meant to. 

‘No,’ said Lord Lyon placatingly. ‘Our staff is too limited to seek claimants. We usually wait for them to come to us. But occasionally we do find that we can be of use to other, ah, _agencies_ , and we are proud to serve. In the aftermath of the revelations about the infiltration of S.H.I.E.L.D., I’m afraid that some HYDRA operations—apparently minor—were allowed to flourish almost unchecked. You’ve seen the news about Trump International’s plans for a vast—and very vulgar—country-club complex outside Stirling, I take it?’ 

‘Yeah. I had my suspicions about that.’ 

‘Naturally. The robustness with which Aberdeenshire County Council upheld planning and environmental protections, when Trump attempted something similar there, engendered a false sense of security in the agents who had oversight of that area, and then, of course, the whole ghastly revelation of the full extent of the S.H.I.E.L.D. compromise—there was some regrettable introspection, followed by the internecine squabbling that introspection invariably promotes. Understandable, but ultimately inexcusable. And the Stirlingshire site turns out to be of considerable strategic importance—’ 

There was a knock at the door. 

‘Come!’ 

The janitor entered, wheeling a cart with chrome flasks, dishes and silverware piled on it. 

‘Tea, Captain Rogers?’ asked Unicorn Pursuivant. ‘Or perhaps you would prefer coffee?’ 

‘Coffee would be good, thanks.’ 

The janitor put a cup and saucer containing muddy liquid in front of him. He was afraid to touch it. The porcelain was shell-like, almost transparent, painted with a coat of arms showing red lions flanking a shield which depicted a baboon-like creature, topped with a crown and the Scottish flag that he knew he wasn’t supposed to call a St Andrew's Cross. A saltine, was it? It couldn’t be _saltine_. The coffee smelled like subway tunnels. 

‘Would you like a nice biscuit, Captain Rogers?’ said Lord Lyon, holding out a plate of sugar-sprinkled cookies about the size of the movie tickets of Steve’s boyhood. Wonderingly, he took one. It had the word NICE stamped into it, as if it was afraid you’d disagree. It tasted of nothing except sugar and left a sticky residue under his tongue. He tried to wash it away with a sip of the alleged coffee and regretted it. 

‘I think they could have managed bourbons, don’t you?’ Unicorn Pursuivant remarked cattily, when the janitor had departed. ‘Or custard creams. For _Captain America_.’ 

‘Well,’ said Lord Lyon, dusting crumbs from the table, ‘to resume. There’s no hope, this time, that the civil authorities will block Trump’s plans. Both Labour and the SNP support it—job creation, of course. But the land comprises a good deal of the ancestral Buchanan estate, including the Buchanan Auld House, and if we could bring a case challenging the title, on the grounds that the original sale was illegitimate—’ 

‘It might continue for years. Decades,’ murmured Unicorn Pursuivant, turning dreamy eyes to the stained ceiling tiles. 

‘It would certainly be very interesting, as regards precedent,’ Lord Lyon reproved. ‘Meaty.’ 

‘But you need a clan Chief to act as plaintiff.’ Steve said. 

‘Pursuer,’ said Unicorn Pursuivant, who was emerging very strongly as the sort of asshole who was actually physically incapable of resisting the opportunity to offer a pedantic correction, especially when there was serious business on the table. Steve glowered across it. ‘And HYDRA isn’t going to be in the dark about this for long,’ he said. 

‘If, indeed, they don’t know already,’ Lord Lyon added. ‘This time, however, we believe we’ve stolen a march. SIS have an extraction team in place, composed of the operatives they quaintly call Sandbaggers. With CIA support, naturally.’ 

It was like a stab wound, Steve thought inconsequentially: you expected it to be acute somehow, precise. But it didn’t feel all that different from getting hit with a heavy blunt object. He realized his jaw was hanging open, shut it, and opened it again. ‘You mean,’ he swallowed. ‘You—can you tell me where he is?’ 

‘No, I’m afraid I can’t. Nor may I, but as it happens, I also can’t. Makes it nice and simple. A location in Eastern Europe, that’s all I know. But if we have your agreement, I’ll go downstairs to the office and make a call on a rather large red telephone—someone has a sense of romance, it even has a rotary dial—and set everything in motion. You could see him before midnight tonight, _Deo volente_. Just give us the nod.’ 

‘ _My_ agreement? What the—? I don’t—no. Do you even? He—’ Steve raised his hand in a fist, but checked himself to bring it down as an open palm on the table. His cup quivered, rattled, seemed to contemplate its future viability, decided against, and cracked neatly in two. Gray anti-coffee puddled the saucer and dripped off the edge of the table onto Steve’s lap. 

There was a small, exquisite, airless silence. Unicorn Pursuivant bent to a canvas tote bag that lay on the floor, cheerfully printed with the slogan _Libraries are ExpAnsive!_ , reached into it and handed him a pocket pack of Kleenex. Steve dabbed and apologized ineffectually. 

‘I understand the difficulty, Captain,’ Lord Lyon began. 

‘Do you? He’s been—he’s been mind-controlled. Wiped, and programmed, and wiped again—for—for seventy goddamn years. You can’t just pull him out and say, OK, first day of your recovery, Buck, you’re a Scottish laird and you’re going to bring a lawsuit against Donald—’ he repressed an expletive, not sure why he did so. Perhaps Unicorn Pursuivant's low mutter (it sounded like _iron brew shy baboon_ , but that couldn't be right) had something to do with it. ‘—Donald Trump,' Steve finished weakly. 

‘No, naturally not,' Lord Lyon continued. 'There will have, of course, to be an extensive course of mental and physical therapy, which I think all the relevant agencies are in agreement that the Avengers are best placed to fund and supply.’ 

‘What—? Who—?’ 

Steve's face was hot, his neck and chest felt sticky and his crotch was sodden with the world’s worst coffee. He had enough self-awareness left to reflect that rage, in these circumstances, was going to look pretty pathetic. He took a steadying breath. ‘Right, OK, I’ll have to talk with some people.’ 

Lord Lyon regarded him curiously through large, distorting spectacles, and said briskly, ‘In the meantime, we consider that the best means for securing power of attorney, after extraction, is through marriage. There is very substantial precedent for a spouse assuming all relevant offices in the event of the Chief’s incapacity.’ 

The ammoniac smell of the coffee, warmed by body-heat, filled Steve’s nostrils. He was going to wake up any minute, sweaty and disoriented, to see the stocking-colored gauze twisted round the sad bed-canopy in the Liddlesdale Hotel. No. He wasn’t. He was awake, and this was real. 

‘Marr—it’s crazy. What the—he wouldn’t be in any state to—to. Consent. I mean, like, have you heard of it? And who would you get to—it’s completely unethical. On every level.’ He flapped his hands feebly over the broken cup, staring wildly from one official to the other. He was still gripping a Kleenex, he realized, and dropped it quickly into the shards of china. Unicorn Pursuivant, he thought, looked like an elderly, self-satisfied pelican, and Lord Lyon like a fuzzy, innocent owlet. They were waiting for him to figure something out. ( _Spouse_.) He figured it out. 

‘No! Goddammit, no, no, no. No.’ 

They blinked, not quite in unison. 

‘It could, of course, be a marriage of convenience—’ began Lord Lyon. 

‘As convenient as you like it,’ added Unicorn Pursuivant sweetly. ‘For both of you.’ 

‘How could you—how do you know _he_ would say—’ He meant simply to say _yes_ , and then he thought of Bucky, the old Bucky, grinning goofily and saying _I do_ , a spray of yellow and white chrysanthemums, Mom’s favorites, somewhere in the blurry middle distance. He took a huge gulp of air, his vision dimming almost to black. He coughed himself back into reality. 

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s transparently fake. We’ll be torn to shreds. What good could it possibly do?’ 

‘I think not, on the whole,’ Lord Lyon said, with the mildness of total implacability. ‘Think how it would look to a public—on both sides of the Atlantic—who are now overwhelmingly inclined to regard same-sex marriage with a benign and somewhat self-congratulatory sentimentality. Second World War sweethearts, united at last, against overwhelming odds, separation, prejudice, so on and so forth. It doesn’t hurt that neither of you—quite look your age. Trump’s terribly—’ here Lord Lyon made a delicate moue of disgust, ‘shy of actual courtrooms, and even with HYDRA behind him, the likeliest outcome is a tactical retreat. If not, then we at least have the satisfaction of tying up some of HYDRA's legal personnel for some time. Scots land law is, ah, _intricate_.’ 

It sounded reasonable. Steve knew how to deal with people who started sounding reasonable at him. 

‘It’s not right. It’s not what marriage means.’ 

‘Really?’ In Unicorn Pursuivant’s accent it rhymed with ‘frilly.’ 

They were looking at him in that expectant, courteous way again. Everything he could think of to say: _shared experience, loyalty, best friends, mutual support, good humor, trust_ ; it all checked out. Checked out with Bucky, anyway. Not with the Winter Soldier. But he’d pinned everything he had, emotionally, on the Winter Soldier still being Bucky at some level, so what did that mean, even? There was one thing he wasn’t sure checked out. It checked out for him, for definite, but he’d never been sure what the bearhugs and horseplay had meant for Bucky, if anything. He’d always dismissed it so easily, even when, especially when, it ended with them jerking off together or—as happened exactly four times, at almost quarterly intervals in Steve’s sophomore and Bucky’s junior year, they jerked each _other_ off. They never kissed or anything. That would have been faggoty, and Steve had had enough of being called, of feeling like, a faggot. He regretted it. That was just one more way in which the bullies had won. 

‘No.’ He stood up. He felt like Alice after she’d eaten EAT ME. ‘I’m sorry about your cup. I guess it isn’t really replaceable, antique or something, but you can bill me for whatever you want. Whatever.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I just want to say—I want to make something clear. If James Buchanan Barnes proposed to me, I’d say yes in a heartbeat. Hell, if I can find him, I might even go down on one knee myself. But I’m not marrying him so two dried-up old Scottish lawyers can get their hands on a _golf course_ , not even a geopolitically important HYDRA-backed golf course. And not even to shaft Donald Trump. So you can go fuck yourselves to fuck and back, turn around and fuck yourselves again. Good day, gentle—’ 

His interlocutors had both assumed a prayerful attitude, palms pressed together, index fingers just touching their chins. They tilted their heads simultaneously to the left, birdlike and enquiring. 

‘Goodbye,’ Steve said firmly, about as glad as he had ever been of the enhanced spatial awareness that enabled him to turn all six three of himself smoothly on his heel in this grim, uncanny little room, full of static and treachery, and find the door and its handle where he expected them to be. 

* 

‘Weel. _Weel._ WEEL,’ said Unicorn Pursuivant. ‘I say.’ 

‘I liked him,’ said Lord Lyon. ‘Such a nice, polite, _passionate_ young man.’ 

‘Not so young.' 

'Compared to us he is, though I suppose that's true of everyone, now. Apart from Dingwall.' 

'Puir auld Dingwall. Where did Rogers say he was going?’ 

‘He didn’t. But everything points to Sovokia kicking off in the pretty near future. It’ll all shake down. Probably.’ 

‘Goodness me. Would you like a cup of _real_ coffee?’ 

‘Oh no, I think we can do better than that, can’t we, darling? After such an _exhausting_ morning?’ 

‘We still have three bottles of the ’99 Tokay.’ 

‘What a fantastic decadent you are, Pursuivant. I was thinking of a large glass of minging Merlot and a small tube of Pringles across the road. Don’t let Brian sell you on those dreadful green Japanese sow’s ear things of his.’ 

‘Well, whatever you prefer—’ 

‘Oh no, you’ve said it now. It was a terrible disappointment, though I’m not sure I expected it to go any other way. And we did try. I think we need the comfort of a really _good_ wine, don’t you?’ 

‘Woof-woof, my dear. _Woof. WOOF._ ’

**Author's Note:**

> Steve remembers Miss Johnson singing Walter Scott's [Border Ballad](http://www.bartleby.com/41/435.html), from which the title is also taken.
> 
> [Common Riding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Riding) is an annual festival in many towns in the Scottish borders.
> 
> Lord Lyon King of Arms and Unicorn Pursuivant of Arms are real titles and offices (as indeed is Dingwall Pursuivant of Arms), though no resemblance to persons living or dead is intended. You can find out more [here](http://www.lyon-court.com/lordlyon/CCC_FirstPage.jsp). In our world, only men have ever held the office of Lord Lyon, but I believe the holder is 'Lord' regardless of gender (or its absence). This may be relevant to the slightly different way in which I've imagined the MCU-verse Lyon Court working. Rules about descent and inheritance have also been presumed to work a little differently in the MCU, but the 30th Lord Lyon, Sir Thomas Innes of Learney, did actually look more favourably on claims through the female line than some of his predecessors, though nothing like to the extent implied here.
> 
> 'When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them.' Oscar Wilde, _The Picture of Dorian Grey_.


End file.
